Three Reviews of My 2010 Chapbook, “Recycling Starlight”

I am grateful for the following thoughtful and caring insights by Joseph Hutchinson, Bruce Ross, and Jane Reichhold

(respectively) into my work in Recycling Starlight. (And to my publisher and editor, Ce Rosenow, at Mountains and Rivers Press, along with the designer, Jonathan Greene and Ed Rayher at Swamp Press, who together produced such a beautiful book.) My writing these poems certainly played a huge part in my healing from great loss as I processed my journey through grief during the first eighteen months following my husband, William J. (Bill) Higginson’s death.

Here are the reviews:

Recycling Starlight, has been reviewed at The Perpetual Bird:

http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-penny-harters-recycling-starlight.html;

in Haibun Today posted in Volume 4, Number 4, December 2010:

http://www.haibuntoday.com/ht44/Review_Ross_Harter.html;

and in Lynx:

http://www.ahapoetry.com/ahalynx/261bookreviews.html (please scroll down).

Another Review of “The Beastie Book”

It pays to search on one’s name now and then. While checking for something else, I came across a good review of The Beastie Book that I hadn’t known existed. I just found it, so am posting it immediately. Then, who knows—I’ll go back to my searching and see whether I discover any other nice surprises. I thank Usha Reynolds for the fine review and hope it helps to spread the word about the book. Here’s the link to the review:

http://www.curledupkids.com/beastieb.html

Happy Beastie Dreams!

Review of my book “Turtle Blessing” (La Alameda Press, 1996)

Sometimes  the universe delivers unexpected gifts. In the early nineties, after Bill and I had moved to Santa Fe, we went to an arts festival (can’t remember its name, but I heard about it on the radio) in Albuquerque, where we met J. B. and Cirrelda-Snider Bryan, publishers of La Alameda Press. I had recently completed the manuscript of Turtle Blessing and told J. B. about it. He said he’d take a look at it—and to my joy, accepted it for publication. I was blessed with a beautiful cover design by J. B. , wonderful illustrations of a turtle shell by Bari Long, and humbling cover blurbs from John Brandi, Jack Loeffler, and Gary Lawless. I did some readings, and the book was well received.

Thirteen years have passed since then, and I am still as attached to the poems in Turtle Blessing as I was then—even did a reading from it several months ago in the local Borders. A week or so ago, as a result of having sent out the post about my poem “The Lone Ranger” appearing on the “Your Daily Poem” site, I heard from Cirrelda that a friend of theirs had written a review of Turtle Blessing—now in 2010! I asked Cirrelda to please give me a link to the review, and this morning she has kindly sent it to me.

It is not an accident that these gifts from the universe sometimes arrive when we most need them. Although it has been almost two years since Bill’s death (on October 11, 2008), and I have come a long way in my healing journey, there are still times when I miss him so much. This morning I woke up feeling lonely and a bit down. I am writing this just after reading Lisa Gill’s review, and the review has gladdened my morning heart on this hot and humid morning here in the southeast New Jersey shore area, where we wait to see whether Hurricane Earl will brush the coast or come further inland.

I am grateful that Lisa Gill loved my book enough to write such a moving review—and am glad my poems touch her heart. Although first and foremost, I write because a poem demands to be written, after work is published I hope that it will somehow reach out to and mean something to others. Here is the link to Lisa Gill’s review:

http://channelingfrank.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/on-turtle-blessing-by-penny-harter/

And here are the texts of the two poems she refers to in her review :

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The Way Home

There is a way home.
It runs through the cornfields beneath the stars,
rises like a river
to wash the apple trees below the barn.
If you are careful you will not disturb the snakes
who curl in the tall weeds
beside the grassy path your feet have known.

Sometimes in the distance
you will see the others,
silhouettes on moonlit hills
carrying hoes over their shoulders,
returning from their fields
even as you go to yours,
sure-footed as a goat
down the stubbled rows toward sleep.

When you climb to the graveyard on the hillside,
stop among the old ones,
take off your clothes,
lie down on the earth
with your head in the shadows
the moon throws between tombstones,
and begin to count the stars
in the Milky Way.

You will run out of numbers.
You will run out of words.
You will forget how to talk to the sky.
You will forget where you have come from,
or where you are going.
You will only know that you are light
among the stars,
that cornfields spiral out from you
on every side, shining corn
as far as you can see—
even over the edge of the world,
that dark circle you have found
at last.

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Tulip

I watched its first green push
through bare dirt, where the builders
had dropped boards, shingles, plaster—
killing everything.
I could not recall what grew there,
what returned each spring,
but the leaves looked tulip,
and one morning it arrived,
a scarlet slash against the aluminum siding.

Mornings, on the way to my car,
I bow to the still bell
of its closed petals; evenings
it greets me, light ringing
at the end of my driveway.

Sometimes I kneel
to stare into the yellow throat,
count the black tongues,
stroke the firm red mouth.
It opens and closes my days.
It has made me weak with love,
this god I didn’t know I needed.

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If after reading Lisa Gill’s review and my poems, you want a copy of Turtle Blessing,  you can order one from La Alameda Press, or on amazon.com. I also have copies for sale. It’s a blessing to know that this many years later, the book is still out there, still offering pleasure to those who come upon it.

Review of “The Night Marsh” by Tracy Koretsky

Last January, Tracy Koretsky wrote a fine review of my most recent collection of poems, The Night Marsh (WordTech Editions, 2008.) She worked hard on it over several days, but hadn’t found a home for yet. Now it has one. (I didn’t have a blog at the time, or I would have posted it then.) The Dodge Foundation will feature me as a “Festival Poet” on an upcoming (very soon, since they are going alphabetically) “Poetry Friday” post, and to help them do so, I have shared (with her permission) Tracy’s review with them.  I am very grateful to Tracy for her careful and insightful review—especially for the time and thoughtful effort she gave to writing  it. Here it is:

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The Night Marsh
Penny Harter
WordTech Editions, 2008
9781933456973
102 pages
$17

Generosity.  If there is one word with which to describe this seventh full-length collection by poet, Penny Harter, that would be it.

First and foremost, there is its dominant theme: the continuity of life, the past simultaneous with the present and future. It’s a trippy idea, frankly – cosmic – and Harter exploits numerous vantages, making it moreso.

Again and again she tells us that we are not alone. For example, in these lines from “A Promise of Home,” Harter offers advise for easing an alien:

and you must tender it your animal hand
as you would to a strange dog, letting him sniff
to learn that you’re okay, you’re not afraid

then, in “Multiple Exposures,” acknowledges the ghost dogs trotting concurrent with our pets, their feet never touching ground. Later in “The Melting Snow,” she reveals the deaths of the three children in an old photo before describing the photo or putting them in, and throughout, extends imaginary empathy from elephants to earthworms.

The Night Marsh is generous also in its address. These are accessible poems in the best way: not assuming anything about their audience – reliably structured vehicles for their ideas, their diction, clean and direct.

It is the offering of a mature poet who has moved past the subject of  “I.”  These are poems addressed to all of us, for the most part, about all of us. When Harter does share of her own life, her images are neither coded nor glamorized and her predominant subject is her mother’s death – a fairly universal experience.

A central figure within the American haiku community, Harter is, as might be expected, at her best as a nature poet. Take this stanza from “Today Toward Sunset”:

Today toward sunset, three crows
soared on the late March wind,
calling to one another until it seemed
that one harsh caw braided the space
between them, then fell toward me
through the fading light.

The careful attention to specific moment: “toward” sunset as opposed to sunset itself; “late” March instead of March – as well as the unadorned word selection demonstrate haiku influence.

I will admit that I came to this collection curious about how a poet so firmly founded in American haiku would integrate its sensibilities into her free-form work. There is, of course, its rather Zen theme, but structurally, by which I mean the disjunctive  “leap” made in haiku poetry between its two parts, I am surprised to find less influence than expected.

Rather, the rare occasions that she does “leap,” are employed strategically, underscoring her theme by dint of their cognitive effect. For example, in “Gossamer” the first and title poem of the collection’s second section, she opens with:

Somewhere in this garden
a spider is spinning
transparent gossamer,
the rooms I have lost.

Here she makes a leap between the third and fourth lines and sets out what will be the section’s primary topic.  A few pages later in “Strawberries and Cream” the lines

You had other lovers.
The years are clouds, dust motes
floating in rooms of afternoon sun

leap from the first to the second, summing the overall theme of the book.

But in contemplating Harter’s choice not to use haiku structure – structure which I suspect she falls into as naturally as hiking – a small but pleasurable exertion – I am struck that as a choice, it is, once again, generous. Harter has provided structures that most readers can easily enter into and feel comfortable within. She opens her narratives by setting locale in their titles or opening lines, stanzas end in paragraphs, if the story comes through a documentary, she acknowledges it. There are no convolutions here, no smoke and mirrors.

And if so many of this gentle book’s strengths are in its generosity, then alas, so too is its weakness. There may be too much of this book – its density crowding out the light of individual poems.

But that too, perhaps, serves its argument. There is less space than we allow ourselves to believe, crowded with invisible yet viable consciousness, our own, only part of a humming whole.

The Beastie Book reviewed on Macaroni Kids

I’m happy to announce that The Beastie Book, has just been reviewed on Hillsborough/Branchburg/Somerville: Macaroni Kid website: http://www.hillsborough.macaronikid.com/

It was posted there last Saturday and will be up throughout the week, during which time it will also be posted nationally on a number of other Macaroni Mom’s websites.

Update, July 12th, 2010: If you click on the site above, you’ll get the current page. Use the “Search” box to put in The Beastie Book, and it will take you right to the review. Thanks!

Here’s the review:

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The Beastie Book – An Alphabestiary. A Visually Captivating Dream Through The Alphabet

Oopsy

The Oopsy ties her shoes wrong

And never combs her hair.

Sometimes she doesn’t brush her teeth

Or clean her messy hair.

Her shirts are buttoned crooked,

Her socks don’t match at all,

And if you try to help her out

She’ll only start to bawl.

The Beastie Book: An Alphabestiary was written by New Jersey author, Penny Harter and illustrated by New Jersey resident Alexandra Miller.

The Beastie Book is a unique and dreamlike imaginary voyage through the alphabet.  Each letter is expressed in a poem about a mythical beastie creature.  Each poem is accompanied by a visually lush illustration.  A little added surprise—each letter is hidden in the poem’s illustration.   When I received the book, I showed my 6 year old daughter.  She immediately was drawn to the art work.  We sat down and read the poems A through Z.  She adored the silly beastie poems and enjoyed searching for the hidden letter.  After we read the book, she scurried away and put in her room where her favorite books go (the place where she hides thing from her younger sister).  At bedtime, we read the book again.  The following day, she was teaching her class of dolls and animals about the alphabet using the book.

My daughter’s reaction to the book speaks volumes—pun intended.  I think the uniqueness of its poems and illustrations captivate the young imagination — and the older one.   My Macaronies gave it their seal of approval and so did this Macaroni Mom.

************************************

I’m so happy with this review by Allison Rebenack, and hope it inspires its readers to check out the book. If you’re interested, perhaps you can even ask your library to order a copy.

*Brand New Review of The Night Marsh*

HURRAH!

Thanks to a “Congratulations” message from a former acquaintance who lives in Northern New Jersey (my previous home territory), I learned that a good review of The Night Marsh appeared in a number of local papers, yesterday. She helped me track it down on-line.  Here’s the notice I sent to my publisher, WordTech Editions:

http://www.wordtechweb.com:

Penny Harter’s The Night Marsh, is reviewed by Sherie Schmauder in “Out & About,” an Art & Leisure section published by Recorder Community Newspapers. These papers include: The Madison Eagle, The Observer Tribune, Bernardsville News, Morris News Bee and others.

And here’s the link to the review:

http://tinyurl.com/klc8mo

I am grateful that Sherie Schmauder chose to review my book, and I hope it results in some sales.  So, between The Beastie Book having gone to the printer; the forthcoming 25th anniversary edition of The Haiku Handbook coming out in Japan in November, and in the states in the spring; and several other publication-related projects in the works, things are going well. I know Bill would be (and is) so pleased.